As devastating wildfires continue to burn across swaths of Canada, the United States, and Europe, oil major Shell posted $9.8 billion in second quarter profits, more than double its earnings from this time last year.

“With drought conditions in southern British Columbia now at record levels, we’re seeing fuel conditions that we have never seen before in B.C., and that is creating explosive fire behaviour,” Cliff Chapman, director of provincial operations for the British Columbia Wildfire Service said at a media briefing on Sunday. Strong winds, reaching 100 kilometres per hour in the North Okanagan, and thick smoke have intensified the struggle to contain wildfires, the smoke grounding aerial resources essential to the fight, Chapman added.

More than 5,000 people came under a sudden evacuation order in the northern end of Okanagan Lake over the weekend, including the Okanagan Lake and Splatsin First Nations, as the Bradley Creek wildfire more than doubled in size in a matter of hours, from roughly 10 square kilometres to about 26, reports CBC News. 

A Wall of Flames

In Clinton, B.C., evacuated citizens anxiously await the signal that it is safe to go home. Fire personnel remained behind to keep the townsite safe from the 668-square-kilometre Pear Lake fire, yet residents anticipate scenes of devastation, especially those who lived on the southern edge of the community.

The blaze “came through with like a 200-foot wall of fire,” Dustin Bentall, musician son of roots rocker Barney Bentall who owns property in the area, told CBC. “All the firefighters and people working on it, they just said they’d never seen anything like it.”

Some 700 kilometres southeast of Clinton, a new wildfire prompted tactical evacuations of residents living near Kimberley.

While wildfires in the Northwest Territories have eased somewhat from July’s fever pitch, authorities urged vigilance as a thunderstorm-bearing cold front moved through the region over the long weekend. The ongoing volatility has prompted the Carney government to announce a formal delay in the long-awaited construction of the Mackenzie Valley Highway, an all-season gravel road stretching 800 kilometres due north from Wrigley, NWT to Inuvik. 

“As communities across the North respond to the impacts of wildfires, the safety and security of Canadians remain the top priority,” the office of Transport Minister Steven MacKinnon said in a statement. “Work will not begin until wildfire conditions are under control and it is safe to proceed.”

Climate Denial, ‘Blatant Racism’ Impede Ontario Response

In Ontario, the Doug Ford government is facing scorching criticism over its wildfire response. Wildfires there have already burned more than 7,250 square kilometres, putting the province on track to surpass its 2021 record, reported CBC News.

From its 2018 $30-million lawsuit against the then Trudeau government to block the carbon tax, to ignoring repeated warnings of the need to dedicate more dollars to fighting wildfires, the “environmentally-backward” Ford government has been both priming the pump for such blazes, and failing to adequately prepare for the moment when they ignite, writes former Toronto Star reporter Les Whittington in an op-ed for the Hill Times.

Last year’s emergency firefighting response ended up costing $271 million, double what had been budgeted. This year’s fire response budget is set at $150 million, spotlighting a failure to prepare that is hitting First Nations communities especially hard, Whittington says.

The Ford government’s failure to invite any Indigenous leaders to a July 18 wildfire media conference in Thunder Bay, together with the federal government’s failure to help residents of Namaygoosisagagun First Nation, leaving them to self-evacuate ahead of a fire that incinerated their community July 13, is evidence of “blatant racism,” said Rose LeMay, a member of the Tlingit First Nation and the CEO of the Indigenous Reconciliation Group, in a separate Hill Times op-ed.

With wildfires now burning in every province and territory, save Prince Edward Island, public health officials are warning again of the perils associated with smoke. Travelling thousands of kilometres from its point of origin, wildfire smoke poses a serious threat to the health of millions of Canadians, with heart, lung, and brain health endangered by elevated levels of highly toxic PM 2.5 pollution. 

“This isn’t a one-time-in-a-life exposure anymore,” Prem Gundarah, health initiatives manager with the B.C. Lung Foundation, told CBC News, citing the organization’s latest annual State of the Air report.

The United States Ablaze

In the United States, the 2026 wildfire season is “off to an early above-normal start,” with nearly 21,500 square kilometres burned to date, well above the 10-year average of 15,000 square kilometres for this time of year, reported the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Colorado, Nebraska, Utah, and Oregon have been hard hit, with almost 6,500 square kilometres now ablaze in the Pacific Northwest state. Parts of Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming are now at critical risk of wildfire, reported Bloomberg.

High winds caused a wildfire to leap the Spokane River in northern Washington state last weekend, entering its namesake county of some 600,000 in a matter of moments and forcing more than 60,000 residents to take flight.

The fire moved so quickly, “firefighters were yelling at people to run,” reports the Spokane Standard. “There is not a fire department in the U.S. that can handle a wind-driven event of this size,” Lance Dahl, Spokane’s assistant fire chief, told the local news outlet.

Death and Destruction as Europe Burns

As in North America, so too, in Europe. “I have been a firefighter for 26 years and I have never seen wildfires of this magnitude,” wildfire commander Matthieu Jomain told Bloomberg News in a recent interview about the Gironde wildfire, which ignited on July 22 near the coast of France, chewed through more than 400 kilometres, and ultimately threatened Bordeaux.

Recently brought under control, but not contained, the blaze generated the country’s first recorded pyrocumulonimbus or “fire cloud” and forced more than 220,000 people to evacuate. Four firefighters have died fighting wildfires in France this season, with scores more being treated for smoke inhalation, reported Le Monde.

As southwest France continues to smoulder, experts are warning that the vast reaches of monoculture pine plantations first planted throughout the region in the mid-19th century are ever more primed to burn as the planet warms. Ecologists and geographers are among those urging the return of mixed deciduous forests and wetlands to the region, reported the Associated Press.

Spain is likewise experiencing some respite from the infernos that have consumed some 1,570 square kilometres of territory since the beginning of July, though Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez is once again urging his fellow politicians to stand with him in building a non-partisan “climate pact” to fight the climate emergency—one that 84% of Spaniards recognize as an existential threat, according to a 2024 poll, reported the Guardian. “Climate change kills,” Sánchez said in a recent statement.

“That’s why it’s not enough to simply address the consequences, which we are doing,” he added. “What we must do is reduce the root causes, anticipate the effects, and consequently, better prepare our country to protect people’s lives.”

Opposition parties are pushing back hard against Sánchez’s efforts, denying the role of climate change and insisting the wildfires are the consequence of poor resource management, the Guardian writes.

But latest research from University of Oxford-based World Weather Attribution found that the extreme fire weather behind the wildfires that tore through Spain in July is now “at least 20 times more likely than in a pre-industrial climate.”

The battle against 21st-century wildfires continues across Europe—from Portugal to Greece, where two wildfire personnel were killed on Sunday when their firefighting helicopters collided west of Athens—and Albania. Fires are breaking out as Europe continues to endure “a hellish summer of relentless heat,” writes Berlin-based Guardian correspondent Ajit Niranjan. Temperatures in the German capital are set to reach 37°C this week, Niranjan added.

Searing Footage

Humans are not the only creatures suffering. Searing footage from southwest France shows panicked deer trying to flee a blaze, only to be turned back into the flames by a wildlife fence. 

“All four hooves are badly burned,” a local firefighter told France 24, speaking about a young fawn his team had found. “He’s probably had to walk through burning embers for days.”

More than 1,100 kilometres to the north of that little fawn, people are mourning the incineration of myriad living things in the wake of a wildfire that tore through the beloved Dunwich Heath National Trust reserve in Suffolk, England on July 31, while edging perilously near to the Sizewell B nuclear power plant, the UK’s largest.

“Although we cannot speculate about the cause of this fire, I can’t help but feel it is our fault as we have made the climate warmer, that is what human beings have done, and scientists did warn,” Andy Beer, chief operating officer of National Trust, which owns the reserve, told BBC News. “So it is kind of our fault.”

Shell Posts Record Second-Quarter Profits

Meanwhile, Shell plc, one of the world’s biggest oil and gas companies, announced second-quarter earnings of almost $10 billion, nearly double last year’s windfall, an amount 350.org called “scandalous.”

“It’s not right that as firefighters risk their lives and families across the UK and Europe face extreme heat, fossil fuel companies like Shell post some of their highest profits in history,” campaigner Ellie May said in a statement. “Fossil fuel companies have known for decades that their products drive climate change, yet they continue to ramp up production while cashing in on the very crises they help create.”

In an interview with the Sunday Times, Shell CEO Wael Sawan described the fires as “very worrying.”

“It’s devastating. Every time I see the images on TV, my heart goes out to the many who are suffering from it,” Sawan said. He urged policy-makers to impose carbon taxes to drive demand for green energy.

The driving force behind efforts to develop the Jackdaw gas field in the North Sea, Shell will shortly be meeting with the UK’s new prime minister, Andy Burnham, and is “expected to urge” him to greenlight the project, reported the Guardian. Jackdaw contains an estimated 120 million to 250 million barrels of oil equivalent.

Since taking the reins at Shell in 2023, Sawan has moved swiftly to dismantle the company’s renewable energy transition despite internal opposition while leading a push to expand oil and gas production.